Understanding Africa Myth 5: Africa is totally backward

Tallest skyscraper in the Southern Hemisphere the Iconic Tower of Durban

South Africa has the worlds second cleanest tap water after Switzerland

South Africa has the cheapest electricity in the world

South Africa’s airports are ranked higher any airport America

Worlds largest Coal Port

Richards Bay Coal Port

South Africa has the largest port in the Southern Hemisphere

South Africa has the largest telescope in the Southern Hemisphere

The Square Kilometer Array

Will be the world’s biggest radio observatory and promises to spur science and economic development in Africa.

The world’s largest network of radio telescopes designed to survey the sky faster than any instrument before it. Roughly 3,000 radio dishes — having a combined total surface equal to a light-collecting area of about a square kilometer — will be spread across vast distances to offer a resolution akin to a single dish encompassing the whole span.

The University of South Africa is a pioneer of tertiary distance education and is the largest correspondence university in the world (Unisa)
Founded in 1873 as the University of the Cape of Good Hope, Unisa became the first public university in the world to teach exclusively by means of distance education in 1946. Today, the university has approximately 300,000 students.

Mauritius is likely to become the first country completely covered by WiFi

Electric Cars

Joule

It was never released commercially; production ceased in April 2012, and in June 2012 Optimal Energy announced its intention to close down

African Car companies

IVM Innosun

Kantanka

Nigeria’s Space Program

Since 2003 the West African country has been operating its own satellites, three of which are currently collecting data from Earth orbit.

Nigerian satalites NG- Sat 2 and NG-Sat X are high resolution satellites capable of giving high quality images from space

The spacecraft was equipped with high-resolution optical and infrared cameras. “They are there to look at agriculture production, improving food security,” says Audrey Nice of SST. The satellite was also designed for environmental monitoring, such as tracking desertification and even locust swarms.

The country’s satellites support food production in the region and disaster relief around the world – including helping with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the US

There are over 200 hospitals in Ghana and Ghana is a destination for medical tourism.[

5.2% of Ghana’s GDP was spent on health in 2010,[144]and all Ghanaian citizens have the right to access primary health care.[145]

Ghana’s universal health care system has been described as the most successful healthcare system on the Africa continent by the renowned business magnate and tycoon Bill Gates.[

As of 2012 Ghana’s HIV Prevalance rate is 0.9% and decreasing , One of the lowest in Africa

Together, they assembled a working generatorthat’s capable of turning a single liter of urine into 6 hours of electricity

Lighting up

And the planned $80 billion Grand Inga Dam, if finally constructed, will be massive: Producing 40,000 megawatts when complete, it will be capable of literally lighting up the continent, providing electricity to half of African countries.

Currently, the world’s largest hydropower plant is the Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River in China, delivering 22,500 Megawatts — Grand Inga will be nearly double the size.

It has become the lead country in the use digital money and makes Bitcoin irrelevant. And the last country to become fully cashless is Libya.

Silicon Savannah

Last year, startups on the African continent brought in more than $185.7 million, according to a report from Disrupt Africa. And Kenyan startups especially saw their best year in fundraising since 2010. Kenyan startups raised over $47.4 million last year, according to the publication.

Companies from Kenya’s so-called “Silicon Savannah” like M-Kopa a solar energy provider for rural areas, Bitpesa a bitcoin trading platform, and Kopo Kopo, a merchant payment system, attracted the bulk of investor attention. The makers of the mobile modem, BRCK, announced last week that it has raised $3 million in December from former AOL heads Steve and Jean Case, as well as media company TED, and Jim Sorenson. This is on top of $1.2 million in seed funding last year

or years, Kenya has been projected to be one of the continent tech leaders, alongside Nigeria and South Africa. Over half of the population of East Africa’s largest economy has access to the internet. It’s home to an expanding pool of mobile phone users, a network of incubators and startup spaces, and a legacy of previous successes like the mobile money platform M-Pesa and the crowd-sourced crisis mapping app, Ushahidi, used for search and rescue during Haiti’s 2012 earthquake as well as documenting sexual harassment in Egypt. Microsoft chose Nairobi for the global launch of its latest operating system. International media began hailing Kenya as the world’s latest unlikely tech hub.

Consider M-Pesa, the world’s first mobile banking service. Also developed in Kenya, it is exactly the kind of technology that taps into these two different customer bases. M-Pesa — the “m” for mobile, “pesa” is Swahili for money — allows users to send and receive funds on their phones, dramatically cutting the time once needed to pay electricity bills in person or deliver money to a sick relative by bus. M-Pesa has already expanded to South Africa, India, Afghanistan, and Tanzania — and is even available in the United States for the African diaspora. In 2011, more than 50 similar mobile-money startups were launched in Africa.

Nor, however, is innovation limited to mobile. The team at Ushahidi went on to develop BRCK, a block designed to provide a reliable Internet connection anywhere in the world — “from remote and rugged locations to your corner cafe,” the company brags. Safaricom, the company that launched M-Pesa, is behind the effort to equip Nairobi’s public minibuses with high-speed wireless Internet. Plus, while Kenya is the undisputed leader, similar development is occurring across Africa. Easy Taxi, a service connecting users with cabs at the click of a button, first launched in Lagos. Communities in rural Malawi are combatting deforestation using GPS, and, in Mali, the IKON Tele-radiology initiative has made it possible to receive X-ray scans and diagnoses over the Internet from remote areas.

World’s largest planned city Abuja

2/3rds of African migrants migrate to other African countries. Only 1/3rd leave Africa